Ora sono ubriaco d'universo. (Ungaretti)

“Carlin Romano’s Wrongheaded Heidegger Assessment,” Stephen Metcalf (h/t Ario) – Everyone should read this; no, I’m not kidding. fta: Heidegger was born on the border of the Black Forest near the turn of the 20th century, and almost everything about his lived reality was pre-capitalist. He did not live in a city; he was surrounded by woodlands and peasants and horse power in its original sense. He felt a deep affinity for nature and an instinctive revulsion toward cities. The university he taught at was a late-medieval institution, founded by the Hapsburgs. Social intercourse was uninteresting to him, but a dialogue across the millennia, with Aristotle and Epictetus, with Kant and Nietzsche, was his life’s vocation. Heidegger believed only the intercession into history of something more powerful than technology could bring modernity to heel. He made a tragic and finally disgusting error in thinking Hitler was that intercession.

“The Limits of Presidential Power,” Megan McArdle – Increasingly, I feel like Obama and his team are trying to run his office like a community organizing outfit. But this is the presidency, not a political campaign. You don’t put your message out through every available channel, you don’t go to war on news operations, and you don’t threaten groups that say things you don’t like. You are now running the whole country, not trying to win a race.